Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday September 18, 2000 @12:09PM
from the drowning-in-submissions dept.

TheTomcat writes "Kuro5hin is back up and better than ever, with its new server from VA Linux. At 2pm(1pm EST) today, the site went live, after a month or so of downtime." Well, this was the first submission in the bin to actually say it was up. Congrats to the whole gang and welcome back. And everyone else stop submitting their return, 'k? *grin* Update: 09/19 01:53 PM by CN: SlashNET will be hosting a forum with Rusty and Inoshiro on Saturday at 5:00 PM PDT (0:00 GMT). Looks like a good opportunity to welcome k5 back, as well as learn how they've overcome the issues that kept them down.

Resurrected from the grave, only to be trampled by the monstrous hordes of/. and ground back into the dust. This proves it once and for all: Cmdr Rob Malda "Pants are optional" Taco was responsible for the original DDOS, and he's done it again...

Just a thanks to Slashdot, particularly Jeff "Hemos" Bates for non-stop gavel-to-gavel coverage of the K5 saga, VA for the server, VHosting.com for the coloc, the Scoop crew for code, Intes for sundry details, and Rusty for not throwing in the towel. Couldn'a done i' w'chout ye.

I'm sure, many people didn't even know about Kuro5hin without/.'s reports. It was totally unknown to me until to the DoS attack. Then I first heard about it, and read about its concept, and I found it great! Let's see if it's really so (when the/. effect disappears, of course:-)!

Great. Now that Kuro5hin is out of trouble, you guys can go back to ignoring it and feeling superior to it.

This is essentially the problem with the geek community in general: unless there's a common cause or enemy, geeks are too busy backstabbing each other. Everybody was backstabbing/. on k5 before it went down, but now that a script k1dd13 slammed k5, Slashdot is being all nice and friendly to it.

How long will Linux survive if Microsoft were to disappear? Or more on the spot, how long before RedHat/Linux becomes the next Enemy? People have already entered holy wars over VI, Emacs, KDE or Gnome...

I would not be surprised if Slashdot was somehow behind all this, and these articles supporting k5 are about proving in a smug, roundabout way, that Slashdot is better than Kuro5hin.

C'mon who didn't expect K5 to go down in flames the first time they got a SlashWave(TM)? Still next time Hemos you might what to give them some notice first, the/. effect is not a toy.
Welcome back K5 we missed you.

Seems to me that they're denying requests that come from Slashdot. So try typing www.kuro5hin.org in your browser, not clicking the link... At first, I just middle-clicked on the link to pop it into a new window, and it didn't load. Then I just typed the URL in, hit enter, and there it was!

So yeah, it's back up for real, but Slashdot links [kuro5hin.org] don't seem to get through... (instead, right click, choose "copy link location," and paste)...

Posted by Hemos on 12:09 PM September 18th, 2000from the time-for-/.-to-drown-kuro5hin dept.
Roozbeh The Atomic Microscope writes "Kuro5hin is back down again, even with its new server from VA Linux. At 3pm(2pm EST) today, the site went dead from/.ing, after a hour or so of uptime." Congrats to the whole/. gang, and welcome back to/., Kuro5hin admins! (we figured that you're homeless again) *grin*

It's good to see them back, it really is. I hate it when something like that happens. However, I must stay that I hope that the quality of kuro5hin's users stays the same. I must say the worst thing for a web log like Slashdot or kuro5hin is to have hordes of immature/bad users. Slashdot seems to be coping with it well enough. Sort of;)'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,

And just how, exactly, are you any different? I just went and read your last 5 comments. Every one of them is an attack. I don't ever recall reading a supportive word from you. And *you* acuse/. of "feeling superior"?

I wonder how the story submission really works? Are they really reviewed by a cadre of trained mammals, as claimed; or is there just a bot which picks out stories by buzzword quotient? Suck dosn't need to do another/. parody --/. has become a parody of itself."The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Same here, and now Kuro5hin has lots of nice new visitors to impress. If they like what they see, they'll stay. Surley this is a good way for the community to grow. You find something good and you tell others about it.

Pardon the stupid question, but the first I heard of this site was when it was nuked by script kiddies a while back. I've kept an eye on the reports of it coming back, getting better hardware and so on, but I still wonder what the page was before? Same as it is now with a different look?(tech news etc) or something different?

If Kuro5hin can't handle the traffic, they shouldn't be in the business.

Damn straight. And if they've got a crappy story submission procedure that can be pushed over by anyone who wants to, they deserve to die, just like certain bits of Outlook deserve vilification and some of RedHat's default policies are not exactly the best.

What a welcome back! They go down and disappear because of a DOS attack, and the first day they get back up, Slashdotted out of existence! Isn't it ironic....don't you think? Damn....I need to get off the coffee.

I submitted an item on the countdown and it's implication of their return at t-44 hours and was rejected. I assumed that somebody had gotten in ahead of me, but now I see that The Powers simply preferred to wait. Ah well.

Every user can look over the submissions queue. Every user gets one vote per story. The vote is either (1) post it, (0) don't care, or (-1) don't post it.

Stories that reach a critical number which is a percentage of the total number of users get put on the front page. Stories can be commented on while still in the queue, regardless of whether they ever make the front page or not. Comments can be one of two types: (1) editorial, suggesting changes to the story in spelling, style, grammar; or (2) topical, pertaining to a discussion. The editorial comments do not survive if the story makes the front page.

All in all it works fairly well.

The best thing about k5 was the people there. The breadth of k5 was much wider than/. Discussions of everything from gun control to how to secure a linux box have made the front page.

we are not denying slashdot redirects. The problem is soo many people hitting it at once. i.e. the slashdot effect. The slashdot effect is not one continuos stream of requests, but waves. So sometimes you can get a reply. But we aren't blocking requests from slashdot. That would be stupid

There is no ToS conspiracy. K5 is laboring under several hundred Apache processes talking to several hundred MySQL requests. It's slow. It has been responding a bit in the past few minutes. It's been performing at peak rated load (about 6 hits/second) for most for the past hour and a half. There's just a lot of requests coming through.

How is that different from any other group of people? You get 4 metal-heads in a room together and they are gonna argue that Judas Priest is better than Iron Maiden... (Black Sabbath is the best BTW, not that I'm a metal-head or anything:)

I had a dream friday night that kuro5hin came back online and
somehow, I'd managed to stumble upon this fact before the news hit slashdot.
As part of their recovery, they'd had to wipe out the user login database,
so everyone was having to create new user account, and since it the site
had only just then been re-introduced, only five people had managed to create
their accounts. I was really excited that I was going to be able to snag a
really 'leet low user id number, so I clicked the button to re-create my
account. However, since I'm just on a crappy old modem, and it's slow as
hell, the form I had to fill out was taking forever to load up. I just
knew that while I was sitting and waiting for the whole page to load, the
article would hit slashdot and I'd be screwed. By the time I had the page
loaded up and filled out, I ended up getting a seven-digit ID number.
I was so bummed.

It should be pointed out here that the last message posted on the Kuro5hin site before they started the countdown indirectly asked/. to post it when they came back up. Besides, they need to get used to traffic, I think a lot of people (myself included) "discoverd" them due to their problems... I found that I rather like the site (Other than the/. effect of course)

The look of the site is quite similar - it has columns right and left now instead of just the one to the right, actual sections instead of everything front page. It's too soon to tell if the stuff they cover will change - I don't think it'll change *too* much though. (But it wasn't just tech news - read some of the old stories...)

-r@wc

"When correctly viewed, everything is lewd
I could tell you things about Peter Pan

Weird - I tried the link, posted, tried the link - nothing. Typed in www.kuro5hin.org, got an instant response. (As in, about 1 sec to load the page. Finally getting good bandwidth to the 'net - they blocked Napster and Gnutella at my college, finally.) Both times I tried off Slashdot, I got nothing. But with no Referrer-URL: header (or whatever, I dunno) I got a very speedy response and was able to browse the site quite nicely.

Actually, it's much more like when you tell a 2-year-old not to stick his tongue out at you. What's he gonna do? Stick his tongue out at you.

Plus the novelty of moderating wares off very quickly. It's too much of a chore to actually be a good moderator. Reminds me of when I was in jr. high, I told a teacher he couldn't hold me after class. What'd he do? Hold me after class (but not that day! See, I had a... uh, prior commitment. Um, elsewhere.).

Basically, if you tell someone "don't do that" what're they going to do? Do it. Similar to the MPAA saying "don't link to DeCSS!" What happened? Everyone linked to DeCSS!

It's not that surprising. Watch - I dare someone to moderate this as "insightful." Now I'll get moderated as "flamebait," "troll," "offtopic" (no one ever bothers reading the parent post, that's just boring!), or, if they're afraid of losing karma, "overrated."

I think it's funny, though, that my browser shows the title of the page as "Cannot Find Server."

This is caused by the Micro$oft Infernal Exploiter 5.5 bug that "refreshing" a res:// page (the error messages) into a working page (like you did with K5) doesn't update the title. Bites me too when viewing slashdotted pages.

Bah. Better to take the Eagle Book [modperl.com] and start making a module that returns 403 Sorry, try again after the media fuss is over error if the request Referer: header matches regex slashdot\.org... =)

The email forwarder www.privacy.nu
is still down, which is rather sad, has anyone anymore information than what is on the front page? "Catastrophic hard drive failure?"
It's nice to know there was so much outpouring and support fo K'shin, but I'd like to see privacy.nu get some help as well.

As other people said, that'll only block traffic
from slashdot.org itself, not people who came
from a slashdot link.

IIRC, HTTP clients tell a server what site they
are coming from (it's called something like
the referrer). You could toggle a setting in
your HTTP server to block people whose referrer
says slashdot.org. Of course, crafty slashdotters
could still bypass the link entirely, but
it would work at least partially, compared to
your solution which wouldn't work at all.

When I just went to smokedot.org all there was was a banner for "crackaddict.com"? And when I went to crackaddict.com just the same thing. oh well..

Oh good, the DNS has updated. Yeah, change of plans - it's possible that Smokedot will be back up tonight! Woohoo! My friend from high school (who I haven't talked to in 4 years, and just/msg'ed me out of the blue on IRC today) offered to host it, and crackaddict.com is his site. Right now I'm waiting for him to get back from dinner so he can finish installing perl modules and stuff like that and get it working.--

/. does not get/.ed every day. To be/.ed is to recieve a sudden transitory increase in site traffic, exceeding the normal peak load. (Due to a bunch of lemmings blindly clicking every link posted on/.) Go play QuakeIII or finish your Algebra homework.

What's wrong with MySQL? We've never had it crash as a result of internal problems in MySQL. The one time it did crash, was because rusty's code couldn't handle the load and apache/mod_perl started going wonky in how it spoke to MySQL (back in July). But Scoop has improve, and the MySQL we are using is a few versions past what was installed there.